Confessions of a Heretic
by Roger Scruton

reviewed by T. Nelson

bought this book twice, though not on purpose; the first time I ordered it along with a gray beanie and a rain parka, and since I was expecting a sizable tome I discarded the first copy of this little 196 page book with the empty box.

Small doesn't mean bad, of course. In these essays Scruton finds philosophical meaning in ordinary things: Facebook conversations, architecture, classical music, dancing, and whether dogs have self-consciousness. Like G.K. Chesterton, he recognizes that what makes life worth living is as often in the insignificant details that make it up, rather than in big important abstractions. The real value of this book, though, as with G.K., is that they are also lessons in how to write beautifully.

If there's an overall theme, it is this:

The crucial claim of Hegel is that the life of freedom and self-certainty can only be obtained through others. ... It is only by entering that world, with its risks, conflicts and responsibilities, that I come to know myself as free, to enjoy my own perspective and individuality, and to become a fulfilled person among persons. [p.100–101]

Hegel called this the Entäußerung, the objectivization of the self (Google Mistrans­late says ‘alienation’) in the world of others. Scruton says mutual interaction of people is what raises us above the animal world and enables us to take responsibility for our lives.

Humans are social animals, and maybe that's why we document every stupid detail about our lives on the Internet with such enthusiasm. Or maybe, cognizant of their own mortality, posting on the Internet is just a way of documenting their life, to make sure they're remembered, as if doing so means it was real. If so, it's a lot like graffiti, which serves much the same purpose.

For me it's more mundane: to write down my thoughts on books so as to avoid buying the same one twice. Next time maybe that will work.

apr 22, 2017

An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture
by Roger Scruton

reviewed by T. Nelson

on't assume from its stupid title that An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture is some sort of travel guide for uncultured rubes who need a quick initiation to Picasso and Stravinsky or a casual list of which cities have the finest cuisine. Rather, what we have here is a series of essays on the origins of Western culture by one of the most literate and insightful commentators of our time.

Roger Scruton believes that Western culture has strayed from the ideals of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was not just a rebirth of rationalism, says Scruton, but also created a new mysticism, manifested most strongly in Romanticism. Romanticism was not a reaction to the Enlightenment, but an attitude concealed within it. By aestheticizing nature, its worshipful impulse saw any change to nature as a form of desecration. At the same time, aestheticization placed a distance between the observer and the observed that could only be breached by destroying its intrinsic value.

Romanticism was replaced by modernism, whose goal, writes Scruton, was to make one last great attempt to save this religious view of man. It also strived to make high culture difficult to understand, as protection against popular entertainment and the ocean of sentimental kitsch made possible by technology. But in its struggle against bourgeois kitsch, modernism abandoned its links to the past and fell into the trap of demanding transgression, as a last ditch effort to get people to think and question authority. Unfortunately, without tradition, originality cannot exist. Eventually modernism had nothing left to rebel against but itself.

Scruton is one of a growing number of cultural commentators, like Roger Kimball of The New Criterion and many others, who argue that Western culture and traditional Enlightenment values should be admired, not just for their own sake, but also as a common language. Although Scruton sometimes takes things too seriously, his writing is full of sharp insights. Yet he still has difficulty explaining why one cultural style is objectively better than another.

What Scruton is really struggling with is more than the question of how to deal with modernity. To Scruton, culture and religion both define how humanity interprets ethical questions. The post-modern predicament, says Scruton, is whether we should teach our culture to the young, or let them create their own, and let our culture die. This is important, but the predicament we are facing today is bigger. Culture determines not just how we view the world, but what kind of world we create. Like religion, it provides a guide for making decisions.

We will need such a guide, because ours may be the century when we have to decide whether to allow humanity itself to be cast aside by artificially intelligent beings or to modify our genome to create an artificial humanity in control of its own future. Our efforts to preserve our culture may seem trivial by comparison, but cultural heritage determines not just what we look at in museums, but how we regard human life, and whether we regard it as worth preserving.

mar 02, 2008

The Soul of the World
by Roger Scruton

reviewed by T. Nelson

iologists often think of religion as a bit of programming designed to protect and bring order to societies. Its social value, they say, is why religion has survived so long. Humans are religious because religion enhances group survival.

Roger Scruton rejects this evolutionary argument, saying that religion is about the search for meaning (what he calls “aboutness”). He demands that atheists consider the content of religious belief instead of just explaining it away. Following Thomas Nagel, he says our capacity of abstract thought could not have evolved by sheer chance. He argues that if evolution could select for a false belief, then all our abstract ideas, including the idea of evolution itself, could be false. Such a worldview would ultimately collapse on itself.

Atheists, of course, would say that this is exactly what is happening to religion. Feuerbach, for example, criticized religion for externalizing our innate sense of virtue, thereby alienating us from our sense of right and wrong. Scruton doesn't address these criticisms; he argues that religion is part of our culture, like literature, law, and music. For Scruton, religion is more than just a set of beliefs, social customs, and rituals. It is our connection to the universe, and to each other.

What he's saying is that science doesn't appreciate the inner nature of the human mind. This is true. But like many religious philosophers he assumes science's current lack of understanding of subjectivity is a permanent feature, and therefore a failing of science. Most scientists would disagree.

This book starts out brilliantly but ultimately doesn't hold together as a philosophical statement. It's more like a disjointed collection of lectures about music, literature and philosophy. But he has many deep insights. One of the more interesting lectures is the third one, Looking at the Brain. Here Scruton goes through the arguments about dualism and concludes that consciousness is an emergent feature of the brain.

An emergent feature is something that came about by accident from a combination of other features. This would imply that consciousness, which many would call our soul, is something that evolved by random chance. It's a surprising viewpoint for a religious person to take.

What Scruton is trying to do is to use philosophy and religion to reach a deeper understanding of how we connect to the world. There are no true individuals, he writes [p.103], but only localized vortices in the one thing that is everything. This is a profound idea, and scientists as well as religious people will find Scruton's erudition and ideas challenging.

nov 27 2014; updated nov 29 2014